Money creation | Quotes about the magic of money

"On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers." Murray Rothbard

"It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages." Henry Ford

"Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets." Henry Ford

"Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others could be in want" Jonathan Swift

"The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline." Milton Friedman

"The stock market and economy are two different things." Milton Friedman

"Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations." Milton Friedman

"You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder." Milton Friedman

"The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit." Milton Friedman

"Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors." G. Edward Griffin

"In the North, neither greenbacks, taxes, nor war bonds were enough to finance the war. So a national banking system was created to convert government bonds into fiat money, and the people lost over half of their monetary assets to the hidden tax of inflation. In the South, printing presses accomplished the same effect, and the monetary loss was total." G. Edward Griffin

"Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?" Steven Spielberg

"The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end." Milton Friedman

"The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." Milton Friedman